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HTML5 is currently in the draft stage, and the latest specification is available at the W3C web site. User experience on the Internet will change for sure, and here’s why: 1. Persistent Local Storage: Two different mechanisms are introduced for local storage, not including cookies. Name/Value pairs can be stored easily. But, more significantly, the introduction of a local database that supports SQL makes life a lot easier for web developers. However, this opens up a whole new world of security risks. 2. APIs: A bunch of APIs have been introduced that support local database interaction (mentioned above), dynamic bitmap…

Yahoo! aims to have a more social web page. This is a desperate attempt by Yahoo! to get back into the portal business. Some of the business decisions by Yang & Co. have come under fire in the last few months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has now risen to the 6th largest PC manufacturer in the world, and 3rd largest in the United States, behind Dell and HP, according to Gartner’s latest report on the topic. In the United States, Apple recorded a staggering 38% growth between 2Q07 and 2Q08.

Steve Jobs recently indicated that over 100 million downloads of apps have already been recorded, with 70 million in August. At this rate, 1 billion will occur sometime in 2009, within a year of the app store opening. Songs reached that landmark in its second year of existence.

Why are apps more popular? Aren’t there more iPods and other portable MP3 players out there? Songs can be played on PCs and Macs too. With the hundreds of millions of computers and portable media players owned by people of the planet, why are apps, which are restricted to the iPhone and iPod touch (the number of these sold are a mere fraction of computers and media pleyers) more popular?

Google’s Chrome captured the browser world headlines this week as the fastest browser with a bunch of cool features.

Chrome was released as a software Beta, and according to Google, is only the beginning. They are relying on feedback from the user community moving forward. Another popular browser, Mozilla’s Firefox has relied on the community for long. Combined, these two browsers control roughly 25% of the browser market share. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is clearly #1.

In addition to other features in Gmail labs introduced recently, there is one feautre which I like the best – the default ‘Reply to All’. How many times have we replied to an email only to realize we forgot to reply-all ? Check out this, and other features on the official Gmail blog

After a couple of days of heavy use of Google Chrome, the annoyances have started. Having a link in the page’s HTML source ending with a special character causes the while browser to crash. So much for only the tab crashing. The bigger and more annoying issue is the fact that I have received the blue screen of death (BSOD) on 3 ocassions. The message seemed like there was an IRQ conflict. Something to do with IRQL not equal. The only thing common to all 3 occurances is that I was using IE and Chrome simultaneously. And both had some…

So, I managed to snag Google Chrome 8 minutes before noon PDT (the official release time). The link was live, and I downloaded it in a flash. Currently, people are reporting that the server is under extreme load and they are not able to download it. Initial thoughts: – The installation imported my bookmarks automatically without my permission. It only notified me. I’m disappointed with that. If it was a confirmation, it didn’t follow the usability standards. – The browser opened up quick, unlike most others which take time. – The rendering of pages was quick, but the fonts on…